Today I'm writing about kale.
This incident happened, maybe thirty years ago, back when kale wasn't cool. Dorothy and I were just finishing up our steak dinner at a restaurant. The young waiter, who clearly didn't know his job, came by the table to see how we were doing. We were munching kale. Says he, "You don't eat that green stuff. It's just for decoration."
Things have changed. Now, to be cool you order kale coleslaw. To be uncool, you add bacon bits, which are fragments of animals raised and killed for the pleasure of humans.
Which brings me back to Todd May and his book, "Should We Go Extinct: a philosophical dilemma for our unbearable times." Todd does the philosopher thing, adding up pleasure and subtracting suffering resulting from a human life, as if you could quantify such things. He says that the average person in the USA consumes 22 pigs, 1560 chickens and 65 cows in a lifetime. He also describes in detail the conditions on factory farms and in abattoires, putting me off my bacon.
About the abattoires, using a mellifluent French word for slaughterhouse is one of the sneaky ways we isolate ourselves from what goes on there. Todd May describes the process in detail and we follow that piggy every terrifying step of way. If we think of bacon as something to improve the taste of kale, le cochon voit sa situation différemment.
Still don't know if we should go extinct, but from now on, I take my kale straight.